The Assembly Line Culture

My father managed a branch of a steel pipe making company in Pennsylvania. I was about ten or 11 the first time he took me on a tour of his company.

Seeing the molten steel being poured from the furnaces looked very impressive to me as a young boy. In those days, steel pipe was created on assembly lines.

As we walked along the conveyor belt, my father stopped at each station to have a few words with his workers who all looked very happy to see him. They had a break from the boredom of an assembly line.

I couldn’t help watching one of the workers cap pieces of steel pipe one after the other. I asked my father if that was all the man did, over and over, during his entire eight-hour shift.

That was the man’s job, and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could repeat the process of screwing a cap on piece after piece of steel pipe for eight hours and not end up in a loony bin.

There I stood, wondering how anyone could repeat, like a prisoner in a chain gang, the same procedure, hour after hour, day after day, from however young he was until he reached retirement age and wouldn’t know what to do with himself until his life’s boredom ended.

Sometime after that experience, I swore that I would never subject myself to a life like that if there was any way to avoid it.

Something in the field of communication would do just fine, I thought to myself. So I studied speech and writing and literature and prepared myself to teach. I’d at least have the benefit of challenges to the brain and the continuous learning that teaching offers.

A decade ago, I turned to writing primarily about political events. Again, after 400 plus published articles, I’m going over and over the same political problems.

Unlike the man capping steel pipe day after day, my work as a writer offered the chance to discover new ways of looking at the world’s problems if not dealing with them.

As those concerned with the fate of the Palestinians, we keep writing about their mistreatment by the Israelis. We screw a cap on each repeated apartheid pipe or illegal West Bank settlement and repeat ourselves again and again. Nothing happens. We feel the boredom of repetition.

Netanyahu at UN

Netanyahu and the coterie of power ruling Israel continue to preach imagined dangers of Middle Eastern countries to Israel. The cap on the pipe repeated “bomb Iraq” until Iraq was occupied in an undeclared war.

When the assembly line in Iraq finished with a pipeline full of falsehoods, the line filled with “bomb Iran” as the repeated cap. False as it is, America keeps screwing it on.

Ray McGovern made it clear that “due scepticism seems warranted, given Netanyahu’s unenviable record of dire predictions with respect to how soon Iran could get the bomb. If Netanyahu had been right initially, the Iranians would have had a nuclear weapon in the 1990s.” Yet we listen.

The propaganda spewed by Netanyahu and company echoes the same false warnings that the neocon blusterers spread in attempts to justify attacking and occupying Iraq.

We will know that the ludicrous deceit has reached its peak when, as happened with Iraq, the Israel lobby begins to call for Iran to prove that they don’t have what they say they don’t have.

The calls by Americans for regime changes represent the most outrageous interference in other country’s concerns and none of our business. But we keep screwing the same caps on the same pipes.

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About Dr. Paul J Balles

Dr. Paul J. Balles, is a retired American university professor and freelance writer. He has lived and worked in the Middle East for 40 years – first as an English professor (Universities of Kuwait and Bahrain), and for the past ten years as
a writer, editor and editorial consultant. He’s a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the GULF DAILY NEWS. Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month. He writes a weekly op-ed column for Akbar Al Khaleej (Arabic). He has also edited seven websites, including grtbks.com bahrainthismonth.com, womanthismonth.com, the webscenes.com, and redhousemarketing.com.

Bibi has lost the plot, Roy Tov said as much in one of his article some time ago.

Do Zionazis ever grow up- NO becuase many are Narcissists.

The narcissist’s is usually infantile, either because of a fixation (pre-genital or genital) or due to an unresolved Oedipal Conflict. The narcissist tends to separate the sexual from the emotional. He can have a lot of great sex as long as it is devoid of emotional content.

I think 4 me that the Zionazi is a refinement of erarlier Supremacist models. The Zionazi allows supremacism even if you are not a Jew like Jimmy Savile or Madonna you can still subscribe to the Zionist dogma.

yes, a thought-provoking post. i hope the following remarks are not too far off topic.

in our dysfunctional society growing up mentally and emotionally is not a common occurrence. in the case of the great majority of people, for a variety of reasons,the process of development is arrested at some stage.

what is regarded as normal because of its prevalence, is actually pathological when viewed in terms of our true potential.

it is in the nature of things that people cannot easily become aware of the pathological nature of their prematurely ossified personality.

two very common behaviours of an internsely repetitive nature illustrate this. they are, as it happens, behaviours that distinguish modern times from previous epochs: driving cars (=automobiles for US readers)and watching television. what could be more normal?

for myself, i have never been a driver, and emancipated myself from the TV habit more than twenty years ago. yet according to statistics
a considerable number of people spend more than 25% of their waking hours on these two activities.

for many, the driving is virtually forced on them by the spatial patterning of homes, workplaces and places of recreation. it is noticeable that in the USA where the phase of rapid urban development took place in an era of mass car ownership, the population densities are much lower than in European cities at a comparable level of economic development. even so, at a societal level, this is a matter of choice.

probably the greatest restriction on psychological development occurs during childhood. children are more or less bludgeoned into conformity. it is heart-rending to see how early their innocent wonder is stolen from them and replaced by the joyless false religion of consumerism.

the view that children are just little grown-ups-in-waiting is as erroneous as it is widespread. for the great majority of people, the spiritual peak of their lives occurs between the ages of three and seven. yet this is completely ignored.

only a fortunate few experience the later adult peak. and outside that charmed circle it is hardly acknowledged that such a thing can really occur.

if it is acknowledged, then it is regarded as some kind of law of nature – whereas there is no evidence that this is really so, except for the imposition of societal norms.

being slightly odd can make life difficult in many ways, but it also serves as a protection. i am odd myself, and have probably only clung to life thus far through the good fortune of being supported in ways not always available.

yet despite the generally confused nature of my inchoate mental processes, i had certain intuitions which later more evidenced-based reasoning supports. for example i early formulated the idea that character is not, as commonly assumed, the product of education and rearing. on the contrary, it seemed obvious that character is what, if anything, survives the process of rearing and education.

likewise, and again at an early age, i realised that everyone around me held an implicit(unconscious) view of human life that requires an increase up to a certain age, say from birth to about 40-45 years old, followed by a slow decline. my instinct was that if i wished to fulfill my own potential i must not accept this ‘programming’.

perhaps that is why at age 64 (hexadecimal 40, despite some physical disabilities attributable to wear and tear, i feel mentally to be only at the end of my adolescence. that is no guarantee of longevity – i may be required to move along before having experienced much of my nascent adulthood, especially as one of the prices i have paid for the prolonged youthfulness is financial insecurity. i am far from being viable on my own – having always mistrusted financial transactions i am an instinctively social being in a situation which sets up rugged individualism and independence as ‘ideals’. a US friend now living in the UK once said round the dinner table we all know David is a flake – a term i was unfamiliar with. i looked it up, and though it was hardly complimentary, i could see some validity in the attribution. later the same person ventured the judgement that if i had been born in the US i would already be long dead. such counterfactuals are difficult to interpret, but again i saw there was some truth in what he said. and in both cases his commments were meant affectionately, rather than aimed as insults.